The Last Tally on the Granary Steps

Ingathering closes today. No one rang a bell for it. The carts kept coming until the sacks ran out, and then they stopped.

I got to the steps before the second bell. The tally-hand had her slate up like every morning — a fresh column, same as always, because she didn’t yet know it would be the last one. By midday the queue behind the last cart thinned to nothing. She wiped the slate at the sixth bell, same motion as every other day this month, and this time she didn’t chalk a new column over it.

Ilya Rylov came for his pay same as the others. He counted it twice, same as his first day here, eight days ago. Nobody remarked on it. He folded the coins into a cloth and tied it the way his mother ties a cloth over a well — three knots — though I don’t think he noticed he was doing it that way.

Old Ren’s stall stood empty by early afternoon. He cleared it a day ahead, so today there was nothing left to clear. A woman I didn’t know pinned a card to the noticeboard by the Customs Shed: a tally clerk, ten years counting cargo and coin, wanting work past the season. The board took it without ceremony, the way it takes everything.

Up the hill the Archive owes an accounting today, by its own deadline, set by its own hand. Down here nobody set a deadline for the granary steps to close. They closed anyway, the way water finds the low ground without being told to.

The ship still sits in the outer roads. Nobody at the steps mentioned it. There was grain to weigh.